Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved (19 page)

That afternoon, I go for a swim. The beach is at its best late in the day. The water is warmed by the all-day sun, and the wind that comes up earlier in the afternoon has usually died down. Best of all, almost everyone has gone home, their body clocks set to some internal timer that goes off at 4:00
P.M.
On some days, the beach is entirely my own.

It was my father, my stepmom, and his second family who initiated me into the secret society of late-day beachgoers. We would vacation, many years ago, just past the elbow of Cape Cod. For a couple of weeks each summer, I would morph from only to eldest child, playing endless games of Sentence Scrabble and Silly Poker with my stepbrothers and looking after my much-younger sisters. My father would bring a huge stack of paperbacks with him, spending a good portion of every day on the deck, catching up on his reading. He passed his books along to me as he finished them. They weren’t books that would appeal to me under other circumstances—his favorites were fat novels by James Michener and mysteries by Alistair MacLean—but sipping lemonade and talking with my dad about them made the read worthwhile. My reader-father could not be coaxed to the beach until the late afternoon, where, once in the water, he was as happy as I ever saw him. He was a strong swimmer; his long body and muscled limbs worked in a graceful synch. But he was willing to play with us kids, too. He would horse around with the boys, and my younger sisters would vie for rides on his shoulders. He taught me how to float the way he did—as if he were sitting on an invisible lounge chair, carefree, fully at ease in the world.

I find my solace in the water as well. My father died young—at forty-eight—and yet I think of him almost every time I float and paddle and ride the waves. When my mom was sick several years ago, I came to the beach, religiously—every afternoon—swimming away the hours at the hospital, the concerns, the unanswered questions about her future. Sometimes I think it is that feeling of being immersed in something much bigger than ourselves that gives us the comfort we seek. The ocean is much more than the sea of our troubles.

Today, I think of Jack. I focus on his matter-of-fact way with me this morning and recall how he, as much as the ocean, helped me through my mother’s illness. I realize that in some ways, Jack has morphed into my father figure. I’ve always imagined that if I were traditional enough to be given away in a wedding, Jack is the one man I would ask to do the honors. That settles it, I think, as I let my worries be carried away by the tide, Jack is staying on the planet at least long enough to perform that ritual. And at the rate I’m going, that means he’ll need to stick around for many years to come.*

*
ONLY A FEW DAYS LATER,
I wake in the very early morning to a clanging sound outside my bedroom window. I reach for the tiny clock by my bed and squint to read the time: 6:20
A.M
. Egypt yawns, but rises with me to look out. We see a man in pale green shorts and a gray T-shirt, hauling a bucket. A concrete man? At this hour? It has to be! I am instantly awake, and astrologically astonished. This is the very first day out of the retrograde. Is this project that closely attuned to the cosmos? I am hopeful.

Outside, I introduce myself to the man. Frank is not one of Ronny’s men, he tells me, but a subcontractor that Ronny called to do the job. “The truck is due at seven,” he says to me, “and I am prepared for every contingency.”

I can’t say why, but his words do not inspire confidence. Maybe because in this short while, I have grown used to men who don’t say a thing about what they plan to do, but just do it. Is it possible I have grown mistrustful of words? I brush away my misgivings, but I do ask him how he plans to do the job. He is convinced he won’t have to pump, he tells me, and my heart sinks. I point out that we have had to pump everything except the lower footings, that the hill is steep, that Ronny was planning to pump. He repeats that he has planned for every contingency, and I wonder (cruelly) whether he has recently learned the word. “What will you do if you can’t pour?” I ask.

“Wheelbarrows,” he answers, and he points his shoulder in the direction of two cement-caked wheelbarrows. Next to them, some buckets, shovels.

Maybe I am wrong, I say to myself, maybe he really is prepared for every contingency.

The truck arrives shortly after seven, and with a sense of déjà vu, I watch this man named Frank botch my job. When he leaves around nine, the wooden forms that Ed and John built for the retaining wall are swollen and curved with the weight of unevenly poured concrete. The upper footing to connect house and cottage is still empty—save for a few shovelfuls that missed the forms.

I feel sick, but oddly calm about the whole episode. I call Ed, and I do not cry. I am not even close to tears this time. There is what astrologers call a “shadow”—about two weeks on either side of a Mercury retrograde period—when the fleet-footed messenger is barely creeping through his celestial errands. Surely this morning’s disaster is the natural result of moving too quickly in the shadow. And to think I fooled myself into thinking the early-rising Frank was right on schedule.

“Don’t worry,” I hear Ed telling me at the other end of the phone. “I’ll find someone else to do it. Maybe Vito.” Vito is the mason who has been waiting to build the wall on top of the nonexistent footing. “I just spoke to him yesterday. He’s busy next week, but he can come the week after.”

“Vito. In two weeks.”
Perfect timing.
*

*
THE ASTROLOGY IS GOOD
on the morning of July 25. Vito is due at eight-thirty and Ed and John have promised the mason will do the job right. I have high hopes even before Vito makes his way up the hill to introduce himself. I am in the side garden, and he is beneath me on the bank when he extends his hand to shake mine. I know from Ed that Vito is not his real name. “All the guys at the station have nicknames,” Ed explained to me. “His real name is Bobby.” I’d asked because Ed often referred to a mason named Bobby, and I was not 100 percent sure he was the same mason John called Vito. “One and the same,” Ed confirmed. Bobby a.k.a. Vito works for the same fire department from which Ed is retired.

“How did he get the nickname?” I asked.

“Something to do with
The Godfather,
” Ed said. “Bobby is Italian, and the guys were kidding him about it, decided to call him Vito. It stuck.”

I am one of the six adults over age forty in America who have not seen
The Godfather,
but my sense is that most of the characters are not nice people.

“You’ll like Vito,” Ed said, possibly reading my mind. “He’s a nice guy.”

“Does he mind the nickname?” I had asked. It seemed to me that a nice guy wouldn’t claim a mobster namesake, that an upstanding, firefighting Italian American might not appreciate the stereotypical associations. “And which name should I call him?”

My question is answered this morning: “Hi, I’m Vito,” the mason says as he shakes my hand.

After my string of bad-luck no-name concrete men, I am so struck by Vito’s confident presence that I can only manage, “Kate.”

A moment later, Jeff, the concrete-pumping man, makes his way up the hill to say good morning, and reminds me we have already met. “I was right here after they dropped all that concrete. Remember?” I do remember him, but in fact the memory of the botched job, the concrete all over my hillside looms larger than Jeff’s face, friendly and inquiring, doing the job right a few days later.

“Right,” I say. That was the first concrete screw-up. Then the 6:20 wonder who thought he was prepared for every contingency. I still can’t believe that guy tried to do the job without a pump. Ronny knew we needed to pump. Didn’t he tell the sub? Or did the sub just decide to try it on his own? “Good to see you again,” I say to Jeff. “You seem to be the one who comes to the rescue.”

Jeff shrugs off the white-knight-in-a-pickup-truck role. “You just can’t do this job without a pump,” he confirms.

“We’re ready to go as soon as Obie gets here,” Vito says, using John’s firehouse nickname to conjure his truck, which pulls into the driveway at that moment. We walk down to meet him. Vito shakes his hand, claps John on the back. Jeff introduces himself. John perches on the truck’s back bumper to pull on a pair of fireman’s boots.

“Yours?” I ask, and he admits that because he has to work later, he didn’t want to mess his own up. He grabbed a spare pair from the station. He looks a little guilty about this.

“I’ll wash them off,” he adds. Vito tells us he found his boots at a boating store over by Kmart. Vito’s boots are not as tall or as sturdy-looking as John’s rugged footwear, but they will do for sloshing around in concrete when he makes the basement floor. Jeff’s boots are standard-issue work boots, caked with dried concrete. He’ll be pumping rather than working in the basement, but he admires the rubber boots of his coworkers. I feel a little bit like a spy from the other side, listening in on these men talk about shoes and shopping. After a moment, I recognize their conversation as a variation on a business ritual: small talk. The chatter before the chore, the patter that precedes the pitch. A verbal warm-up for the task at hand.*

*
THERE IS A FAIR AMOUNT
of setup work before the concrete will flow. This time, instead of a crane, Jeff has a smaller pump that is hitched to a pickup truck parked high in my driveway. The barrel-shaped pump has heavy hose attachments, which are spread from the driveway to the basement, crossing through the bed of daylilies. The orange tiger lilies are transplants from the wild and almost impossible to kill. Still, the sight of the trampled lilies, in bent bloom—and some of Barbara’s transplanted irises, too, not as hardy—makes me sad. I remind myself that I have saved as many plants as I possibly could, and that I cannot maintain the respect of these men if I am always asking them not to step on my flower beds. I let the lilies lie.

The cordless phone in my pocket rings, and I run inside to take the client call. Maine calling. This one will take awhile. I am disappointed that I have to miss the flow of the concrete, but I am back outside in time to watch John and Vito and Jeff inside the basement, working on the floor, moving around in their boots. Soon enough Jeff cedes the job to the better-booted John and Vito; not long afterward, John gives over the finish work to Vito. “This is what he likes to do,” John says to me. We sit inside the frames for the cellar windows, the entry point for the concrete this morning, and look in on Vito.

Vito swirls the concrete, levels it, swirls and levels again. He is on the upper section of the basement, kneeling on a board, working with his hands. John leaves me to remove his heavy boots, and I stay to watch, snapping a picture of the deep gray floor against the pale gray walls. How can a concrete floor look so beautiful? But it does. Perhaps the long wait for my basement accessory item enhances my appreciation of concrete beauty, but more likely, I am taken with the fine workmanship that the mason brings to the job. While he works, Vito tells me the names of the tools they have been using: trowels, floats—the big one a “bull float”—and the funny number that looks like a bicycle handle, called a jitterbug. I repeat the words, hoping to remember them, holding them in my mind like another set of lucky pennies.

When Vito moves from the basement to the footing for the foundation that will connect house and cottage, I move with him. John joins us there, now wearing regular work boots. I watch the two of them, working closely, silently. As if by secret signal, John gets up to help Jeff load some of his equipment, once again leaving the finish work in Vito’s hands. Stationed in the ditch between house and cottage, I watch him, or more accurately I watch his back, his blue T-shirt moving with the motions of his arms.

“I wonder who figured out concrete.” I say it almost without realizing I have spoken aloud.

Vito is leveling the footing, using his hand trowel, and he responds immediately, “Oh, it was the Romans.” He gives me a brief history of concrete. He talks about sand and a beach in Italy, and he tells me that the concrete in ancient times was much stronger than the kind we use today.

“Really?” Inane, but all I can think to say.

“Yes,” he says. He speaks of grades of concrete for a moment. “The strongest grade we use—to hold up skyscrapers—isn’t even as strong as the concrete they used in ancient Rome. Think of the Colosseum,” he says.

“It’s still standing. Because of the strong concrete?”

Vito smiles, nods.

I am afraid to look into his big brown eyes, afraid to return his smile with my own. Afraid that I may fall in love with this man. A firefighting mason who does such beautiful work, a man who can tell me how the walls were built in ancient Rome, a man who answers questions I wasn’t even aware I’d asked.*

*
BY THE TIME
Vito finishes the footing, I am nursing a full-fledged crush. My inner cynic congratulates me on the eight-week interval since my last infatuation. But my inner romantic believes this is more than just fifteen minutes of fascination. I can imagine dating Vito. But I cannot imagine that Vito is unattached. He’s too handsome, too sweet. He has to be taken. Katrina says that is a defeatist attitude. “Any wedding ring?” she asks me.

“No, but how could he wear one in his line of work?”

She gives me that much. But she is convinced, in her romantic way, that I will meet a man on this project. Perhaps that man is Vito. For moments at a time, I allow myself to believe that could be true. But even if he is available, I’m pretty sure he is a lot younger than I am. This argument gets nowhere with Katrina; Ruben is eleven years younger than she is. “Flirt a little,” she tells me.

Flirting is not my strong point. And I don’t exactly believe in it, either. At least I don’t believe in it as a means to an end, or as a casual activity among strangers. I don’t deny the energy that flows between heterosexual men and women who have something—for example, this cottage project—in common. I know that if I were male, my interactions with John and Ed and Mr. Hayden and Vito and all the rest of the men on this project would be quite different. I am aware that they are aware I am female. I think back to the woman in the Health Department, and how I wished she were male. (She probably would have been happier if I were male as well.) It’s tricky, this geography of gender. On one hand, I hold dear the feminist principles of equality, fairness for all, and I remain ever-grateful to the strong-hearted women who made possible my life as a self-employed, home-owning, cottage-moving female. On the other hand, there is what Erika calls “eye softening,” a perceptible warmth that creeps in around the eyes when two people like each other. I am pretty sure there would be a lot less of that if I were just another one of the guys.